Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Florence Nightingale
-
Standard Name: Nightingale, Florence
Birth Name: Florence Nightingale
Nickname: Flo
Nickname: The Lady-in-Chief
Nickname: The Lady of the Lamp
Nickname: Commander-in-Chief
Nickname: Wild Ass of the Wilderness
FN
's fame began when she headed nurses in the Crimean war. After the war, she worked to reform health care and promoted sanitation at home and abroad. To this end she composed speeches, government reports, statistical analyses, articles, and pamphlets. She travelled extensively in her youth, producing many letters which were later collected and published. She also wrote theology, including the work which contains her feminist fragment Cassandra. Although FN
was a versatile, political, and prolific writer (she produced over two hundred literary works during her career), she is remembered almost solely for her nursing work.
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Gale Research, 1996.
Here MS
writes grippingly of her own life, and illuminatingly about myriad subjects of public or cultural interest: the lives, customs, and deaths of newspapers, the conspiracy of silence about sex which had not dissipated...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Gaskell
The issue of female employment is as important to this text as its better-known concern with sexual transgression, since Ruth is a redundant woman with few options open to her. In fact, her infusion of...
Textual Production
Harriet Martineau
This paper, a challenger to the Times, favoured free trade and other liberal causes.
Chapman, Maria Weston, and Harriet Martineau. “Memorials of Harriet Martineau”. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, James R. Osgood, 1877, pp. 2: 131 - 596.
449
Webb, Robert Kiefer. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. Columbia University Press, 1960.
314
HM
wrote on everything from politics to agriculture, and from geography and history to the East and West...
Textual Production
Lettice Cooper
LC
issued further biographies of eminent Victorians designed for young people: The Young Florence Nightingale, 1960, The Young Victoria, 1961, The Young Edgar Allan Poe, 1964, and A Hand Upon the Time...
Textual Production
Harriet Martineau
Although Martineau appeared as the book's sole author, she and Nightingale
were in effect collaborators. The latter solicited her help on the issue of sanitary reform, and supplied the data, including printer's plates for statistical...
Textual Production
Jane Williams
She produced the book after a meeting with Davis in 1856 that took place under circumstances which led the writer to appreciate more fully the extraordinary character and history of Elizabeth Davis.
qtd. in
Beddoe, Deirdre et al. “Introduction”. The Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis, Honno, 1987, p. ix - xix.
ix
The book...
Textual Production
Mary Angela Dickens
Taylor worked as a nurse alongside Florence Nightingale
in the Crimean War before converting to Catholicism
and establishing her Congregation
. She published a novel about historical persecution of English Catholics as well as an...
Textual Production
Lilian Bowes Lyon
LBL
's work has been reprinted in The World Split Open, 1984, edited by Louise Bernikow
; it has been discussed by Margaret Willy
(in Essays and Studies, 1952), and Anne Treneer
(in...
From this time on, JT
sometimes published a new book as Caroline Harvey, and sometimes reassigned to her pseudonym works first issued under her own name. Leaves from the Valley, for instance (whose...
Textual Production
Catherine Marsh
The book includes frequent letters to and from Marsh's sisters as well as her close friend Caroline Maitland
. She also kept a regular correspondence with Florence Nightingale
, Hedley Vicars
, the Archbishop of Canterbury
With Bessie Rayner Parkes
, MH
co-edited the English Woman's Journal, for which she also wrote on such subjects as Harriet Hosmer
and Florence Nightingale
.
Rendall, Jane. “A Moral Engine? Feminism, Liberalism and the English Womans JournalEqual or Different: Womens Politics 1800-1914, edited by Jane Rendall, Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 112-38.
116, 120
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Textual Production
Kate Marsden
She ends this part of the volume not with her own signature but by quoting what she represents as an encouraging prayer or blessing from Florence Nightingale
, who tells Marsden she prays the Father...
Textual Production
P. D. James
PDJ
returned to a hospital setting for her fourth mystery novel, Shroud for a Nightingale, which brought her high praise from critics and introduced her to a major world market.
